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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 27, 2014
community center in Chinatown named
after Betty Ong, a flight attendant
who perished when American Airlines
Flight 11 was hijacked and crashed into
the World Trade Center. Obama was to
give a speech on immigration. Out the
window, you could see people waving,
people hoisting their babies as if to
witness history, people holding signs
protesting one issue or another---the
Keystone pipeline, especially---and, ev-
erywhere, the iPhone clickers, the Sam-
sung snappers.
The Beast pulled under a makeshift
security tent. Obama gets to events like
these through underground hallways, in-
dustrial kitchens, holding rooms---all of
which have been checked for bombs. At
the Ong Center, he met with his hosts
and their children. ("I think I have some
Presidential M&M's for you!") People
get goggle-eyed when it's their turn for a
picture. Obama tries to put them at ease:
"C'mon in here! Let's do this!" Some-
times there is teasing of the mildest sort:
"Chuck Taylor All-Stars! Old style,
baby!" A woman told the President that
she was six months pregnant. She didn't
look it. "Whoa! Don't tell that to Mi-
chelle. She'll be all . . ." The woman said
she was having a girl. Obama was de-
lighted: "Daughters! You can't beat 'em!"
He pulled her in for the photo. From
long experience, Obama has learned
what works for him in pictures: a broad,
toothy smile. A millisecond after the
flash, the sash releases, the smile drops, a
curtain falling.
A little later, Betty Ong's mother and
siblings arrived. Obama drew them into
a huddle. I heard him saying that Betty
was a hero, though "obviously, the heart-
ache never goes away." Obama really is
skilled at this kind of thing, the kibbitz-
ing and the expressions of sympathy, the
hugging and the eulogizing and the
celebrating, the sheer animal activity of
human politics---but he suffers an anxi-
ety of comparison. Bill Clinton was, and
is, the master, a hyper-extrovert whose
freakish memory for names and faces,
and whose indomitable will to enfold
and charm everyone in his path, remains
unmatched. Obama can be a dynamic
speaker before large audiences and
charming in very small groups, but, like
a normal human being and unlike the
near-pathological personalities who have
so often held the office, he is depleted by
the act of schmoozing a group of a hun-
dred as if it were an intimate gathering.
At fund-raisers, he would rather eat pri-
vately with a couple of aides before going
out to perform. According to the Wall
Street Journal, when Jeffrey Katzenberg
threw a multi-million-dollar fund-raiser
in Los Angeles two years ago, he told the
President's staff that he expected Obama
to stop at each of the fourteen tables and
talk for a while. No one would have had
to ask Clinton. Obama's staffers were
alarmed. When you talk about this with
people in Obamaland, they let on that
Clinton borders on the obsessive---as if
the appetite for connection were related
to what got him in such deep trouble.
"Obama is a genuinely respectful per-
son, but he doesn't try to seduce every-
one," Axelrod said. "It's never going to be
who he'll be." Obama doesn't love fund-
raising, he went on, "and, if you don't
love it in the first place, you're not likely
to grow fonder of it over time."
Obama has other talents that serve
him well in public. Like a seasoned
standup comedian, he has learned that a
well-timed heckler can be his ally. It al-
lows him to dramatize his open-minded-
ness, even his own philosophical ambiv-
alences about a particularly difficult
political or moral question. Last May, at
the National Defense University, where
he was giving a speech on counter-terror-
ism, a woman named Medea Benjamin,
the co-founder of the group Code Pink,
interrupted him, loudly and at length, to
talk about drone strikes and about clos-
ing the American prison at Guantánamo
Bay. While some in the audience tried to
drown her out with applause, and secu-
rity people proceeded to drag her away,
Obama asserted Benjamin's right to "free
speech," and declared, "The voice of that
woman is worth paying attention to."
At the Ong Center, an undocu-
mented immigrant from South Korea
named Ju Hong was in the crowd lined
up behind the President. Toward the end
of Obama's speech, Ju Hong, a Berkeley
graduate, broke in, demanding that the
President use his executive powers to
stop deportations.
Obama wheeled around. "If, in fact,
I could solve all these problems with-
out passing laws in Congress, then I
"That's what I'd give my sister-in-law if she could take care of nice things."
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